As the name implies, managed hosting refers to the hosting plans that are administered by the hosting service provider. In the web hosting market, the prices for managed hosting packages vary from $30 per month to over hundreds of dollars per month. The low end managed hosting plan generally employs VPS hosting while the high end managed hosting plan is often an upgraded version of a dedicated hosting plan. Since the price range is huge, it is very important to understand what services and features you should expect from these managed hosting plans.

What is "Fully Managed Hosting"?

When web hosting firms promote their managed hosting plans, they often use the phrase "fully managed". This term is actually really relative. One may think that the plan is fully managed while others might think that the technical support they receive from hosting firms is not sufficient. So the rule of thumb is: the higher the price, the more technical support you will get.
In fully managed hosting plan, your website will be monitored by experienced webmasters on a regularly basis. Simply put, you don't have to worry about server downtimes and other technical issues. All you need is to pay and then receive updates from your managed hosting provider. You can sit back and enjoy!!
There are also "partial managed web hosting" plans in the market. For these plans, your websites are still monitored by the staff from your web hosting provider. However, the end users are also required to perform some administrative functions for maintaining their websites. In this situation, end users will have more control over their own servers. So, it is strongly recommended that you to check with the web hosting providers to see how much technical support is provided before making your final decision.

Benefits of Managed Hosting

Managed hosting is especially good for small to medium sized business firms since it is very costly to hire a full-time in-house webmaster to maintain their websites. Since maintaining a business website for maximum uptime is very important nowadays, managed hosting would be the perfect solution for business to outsource the technical demand to the professionals from the web hosting firms. Although managed web hosting plans are much more costly than shared web hosting plans, you save a great of deal of resources and time on maintaining your website. The savings you acquire can definitely enable your business to outperform your competitors.